Grave robbers unearthed the remains of former Cypriot president Tassos Papadopoulos and stole his body by night from a suburban graveyard, Cyprus police said Friday, a day before the first anniversary of the statesman's death.

"The grave of the former president has been violated and the body robbed. We are still investigating," said police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos.

Investigators believe the body was taken either late Thursday night or early Friday morning. The motive is unclear. Grave-robbing is rare in Cyprus.

Mounds of freshly dug-up earth lay at the site of the robbery in the Deftera village cemetery in a southwestern suburb of the Cypriot capital, Nicosia. Police investigators cordoned off the area and were searching the site.

Current President Demetris Christofias, who beat Papadopoulos in February 2008 elections, urged Cypriots "to remain calm in the face of this provocative act."

"This is an unacceptable, unholy, unethical and condemnable act that damages our tradition, our culture and our respect toward the dead," Christofias said.

Papadopoulos, a hardline president who ushered the ethnically divided island into the European Union after rallying Greek Cypriots to reject a United Nations-brokered peace deal, died a year ago on Saturday from lung cancer at age 74. He served as president from 2003 until he lost the 2008 presidential election to Christofias.

A British-trained lawyer, Papadopoulos was a veteran of Cypriot politics whose career spanned most of the island's turbulent history since gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1960.

He was a leader of the Greek Cypriot guerrilla group EOKA, which waged an anti-colonial campaign, and served as the youngest cabinet minister in the island's first post-independence government, at the age of 26.

Papadopoulos was for a time the chief Greek Cypriot negotiator in settlement talks with the breakaway Turkish Cypriots after 1974, when Turkey invaded the island in response to a coup by supporters of uniting the island with Greece.